There are new dynamics at play to kill Jesus once again as well as His people, the Christians.
The battle is twofold, physical killing and psychological killing.
I am moved to write this as the result of a dream. Laugh if you care to, joke if you must this effort is not of my choosing.
In deep slumber, I find myself in a church that looks somewhat familiar, almost like my parish church but different. You know the way dreams can be, slightly askew. I am at Mass and am witnessing a disturbance. A rather tall gaunt looking man with stringy waste length hair, eyes as black as coal and zombie like skin is climbing over the backs of the benches. I don’t see him directly commit violence but I clearly understand that is his aim and that it is eminent. Abruptly, my vision is drawn to several similarly dangerous looking characters behaving in like fashion among the congregants. It is an attack of some kind. I am not sure what is to follow. The fear is palpable. The images are imprinted in my mind and do not leave me as most dreams would. They linger until morning and stay with me after I wake. It is haunting to put it mildly.
As a Catholic, attending Mass is the safest place I can possibly be. Me with God and other believers in a holy place. Participating in the holy sacrifice that celebrates Jesus’ death and resurrection that saved the world from sin is not a place to have attackers bring violence or even the mere specter of evil in God’s house. Yet it is happening globally as the security of churches around the world has been breached.
Christianity as a belief, as a religion, as a way of living a good life, as a community is under attack.
As the expansion of Islam gains strength and moves across the world one of its clear targets is the Christian faith. I am not a theologian so I cannot speak to the origins of this adversity nor its clear vehemence, yet it is undeniable. Many thousands of Christians have been kidnapped, captured, tortured and killed as infidels in the eyes of the Muslim enemy. Yes, I just said enemy. Any other description evades the reality. A Catholic Priest killed at the altar, Christians made to kneel on a beach to be beheaded, school children taken and forced to declare allegiance and fidelity to Allah are but a few of the road signs.
People who want to call me xenophobic have every right to do so. We have free speech in this country. They would point to the Crusades as the Christian version of this religious war. Sadly, they are woefully wrong and inaccurate. The Crusades did not happen for almost 500 years following a massive and aggressive Islamic expansion of conquests across the globe. Large swaths of Europe, Africa and Asia had been overrun and occupied by Muslims who sought to inflict Islam on the citizens by force. It is not a leap to see the beginnings of a historical repeat. Only today communications are instant, information is readily available and the entire world is connected electronically so it will not take 500 years to connect the dots. Merely add up the discord that is being sown to understand what is happening.
The physical attacks are clear and apparent but the physiological a bit subtler. Islam is being given deference that is disproportionate to native citizens of the counties that are expanding into. An elite cadre of academics, globalists and governments have formed a cabal to foster the Muslim expansion. Citizens are being labeled xenophobes for objecting to forced preferences afforded immigrants from the Middle East. This very same cadre of proponents fails to identify that that societal norms are being eroded or that Christians are dying at the hands of the very same group that they embrace.
It is pure ignorance that drives these protectors. Every country that has gone down the multiculturalism black hole is either feeling the wrath of its citizens or is totally ignoring the reality in the streets of their own cities. Islam is not an inclusive religion. It is a belief system that rejects diverse thought and any secular ways of life. If you don’t believe this take one look at Iran from the 1970’s and compare it to the Iranian way of life today. Before the mullahs took over Iran was a prosperous, thriving secular cosmopolitan country with crowded beaches, where women thrived, citizens had a night life and great individual wealth, but is now a dark theocracy that has thrown the country back to the fourteenth century. Sharia law is the law of the land. Women are oppressed beyond our understanding; human rights are abridged and disallowed in a wholesale fashion. This is not progress by any stretch, yet to say so comes with being labeled xenophobic.
Remember always, for evil to prevail good men must remain silent. Be silent no more. Not only Christianity, but the whole world depends on it.
Jesus said to Peter, “I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” I am sure that the church will remain until the end of time, but what that will take is yet to be seen.